LONDON — A reporter wanted to know whether Serena Williams contemplates adding more variety to her power-based game.
She did not take kindly to the question’s premise.
“I don’t only play hard tennis. Maybe if you want to get out there, I can show you, like, how I mix things up. I hit a lob today. I’m hitting slices and drop shots, especially more recently,” Williams replied.
“Power’s often extremely good to have in your game,” she continued. “But if I were to sit here and hit every ball hard, my arm would fall off.”
It’s true that Williams does pound serves, up to 121 mph (195 kph) in the first round of Wimbledon on Tuesday. And her groundstrokes are big, too, enough for a 25-5 edge in winners against Mandy Minella of Luxembourg. It’s also true that Williams has been showing off a soft touch when needed during a winning streak that reached 32 matches — the longest single-season run on the women’s tour in 13 years — with a 6-1, 6-3 victory over Minella.
That marked the top-seeded and top-ranked Williams’ return to competition following a little break after winning the French Open on June 8 for her 16th Grand Slam trophy.
Also her first match on a grass court since winning her fifth Wimbledon title and two Olympic gold medals back-to-back at the All England Club a year ago. That was the beginning of a stretch in which Williams has gone 75-3 and claimed three of the past four major championships.
“You can call her pretty much unbeatable,” the 92nd-ranked Minella said. “She’s playing better than ever. ... Every time she steps on court, you can see why.”
Off the court, things have been a little more hectic for the 31-year-old American lately. Tuesday’s victory capped a week filled by a headline-grabbing, off-court tiff with Maria Sharapova and a series of apologies stemming from a magazine profile.
Williams and the French coach who’s been helping her for about a year, Patrick Mouratoglou, agreed that she did not have too hard a time setting aside the events of the previous seven days, which included a lot of saying “I’m sorry” — face-to-face with Sharapova, at a news conference, in two separate statements posted on the web — over things Williams was quoted as saying in a Rolling Stone story. Williams made a negative reference in a phone conversation to a top-five player’s love life (the piece’s author surmised that was about Sharapova) and an off-the-cuff remark about a widely publicized rape case in the U.S. that was perceived by some as criticizing the victim.
“It hasn’t been a distraction,” Williams insisted. “I’m just here to focus on the tennis.”
The third-seeded Sharapova and Williams are on different halves of the draw and could meet in the final. Sharapova, the 2004 champion, was scheduled to play her second-round match Wednesday on Court 2 against 131st-ranked qualifier Michelle Larcher de Brito of Portugal.
Other women slated to play on Day 3: second-seeded Victoria Azarenka, the two-time Australian Open champion who twisted her right knee in a first-round victory; 2011 Wimbledon winner Petra Kvitova; 17th-seeded Sloane Stephens of the United States. Seven-time Wimbledon champion Roger Federer was to face Sergiy Stakhovsky on Centre Court, while 2012 U.S. Open champion and Wimbledon runner-up Andy Murray was placed on Court 1.
Murray, of course, is hoping to be the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years, but he’s not the only local product still around of the 10 who were in the field at the outset.
Laura Robson, a teenager who beat Kim Clijsters at the U.S. Open last year in the final match of the four-time major champion’s career, became the first British woman in 15 years to eliminate a top-10 opponent at Wimbledon by defeating No. 10 Maria Kirilenko 6-3, 6-4.
Otherwise, order mostly was restored after Monday’s stunning development: the only first-round Grand Slam loss of 12-time major champion Rafael Nadal’s career.
Novak Djokovic dispatched 34th-ranked Florian Mayer of Germany 6-3, 7-5, 6-4, and the only real hitch was when the top-seeded Serb slipped to the Centre Court grass. No. 4 David Ferrer, who reached his first Grand Slam final at the French Open but lost to Nadal, took two falls and said he felt a “little bit of pain” in his left ankle during a 6-1, 4-6, 7-5, 6-2 victory over 101st-ranked Martin Alund of Argentina.